Dan Perovich's Cyberfront Property

Photo365-20091223 – A Christmas Masterpiece, originally uploaded by HokiePerogi.
1/2 sec @ f/11, ISO 1600, 20 mm (EF-S18-55mm f/3.5-5.6 IS)

I am pretty sure this will be the last Christmas tree photo during the project.  I am not going to promise anything, but I will try.  You never know what opportunities may come when we take down the tree in a week or two.   I am hoping that we take the tree down in the next week or two instead of leaving it up until sometime in February or March like we did last year!

With this picture, I wanted to capture the finished masterpiece that my fiancee put together this year for our tree.  While last year’s, Virginia Tech themed tree still remains my favorite, this one is a close second.  We never were able to figure out why half of a strand of lights completely went out the day after putting the decorations on.  We decided to live with it instead of pulling off all the ornaments and stringing a new set of lights.

I used two flashes for this picture.  Each one was set up on a flash stand and coupled with a reflective umbrella.  I placed one umbrella and strobe combination atfar camera right and one far camera left.  Both were set to a height roughly the size of the tree.  The umbrellas were then pointed down at about forty-five degrees.  If I had to estimate, each rig was about ten to twelve feet away from the base of the tree.  I wanted to ensure that the light would spread evenly across all visible parts of the tree.  I had to play around with the direction of the umbrellas to eliminate the spectral highlights on the walls of the room as much as possible.

In the end, I was able to produce today’s image.  The ISO got a bit higher than I normally like to shoot with.  In order to get more light out of my flashes, I was “forced” to raise my ISO so that I could keep the other elements of the photograph as I liked them.  For example, I did not want to increase my aperture from f/11.  If I allowed more light in by increasing my aperture from f/11 to, say f/8, I would have lost the star-bursting effect on the tree lights.  I also did not want to slow my shutter speed down much more than 1/2 second.  At 1/2 second, I was able to achieve a believable balance between the white light of the flashes and the yellow-colored light from the tree.  If I slowed the shutter down to 1 second, I risked letting the yellow-colored light from the tree contaminate the rest of the light in the room and making it look more artificial.